Edit: we've banned this account for doing flamewar on HN. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22607118. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
You are a plain fool if you don't understand that the CCP literally sets the narrative out of China, imposed with force. Tow the line or, at best, lose social credit points, at worst enjoy your permanent stay at gulag.
The Soviet Union only collapsed some 30 years ago. The CCCP was literally the model that the CCP is based on. Don't be naive.
You've done a lot of damage in this thread. I'm not going to ban you because you've been a good user in the past, but please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977 and don't do this again.
Edit: I spoke too soon. Alas, you've been spreading this contagion in other threads as well—including shockingly bad-for-HN comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587177. Therefore I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
There is legitimate evidence of Canadian researchers working on coronaviruses in bats smuggling something to the Wuhan lab. Arrests were made a month before people across the world were taking the virus seriously.
Also the lab in Wuhan has leaked at least one SARS strain in the past.
>They're no more responsible for the virus
Do you understand the conditions of the ubiquitous meat markets in China? Do you realize how easy it is for pathogens to spread when you stack wild animals in cages on top of each other, torture and butcher literally everything, wild animals off the street, in open air and on the literal ground?
The reality is that most of China is third world. Sorry, sometimes specific cultural practices are harmful to people and societies.
The virus smuggling thing cannot be linked to the outbreak. However the whole culture of consumimg exotic mammals really needs to stop. Wuhan had a flourishing underground animal market apart from the usual vast meat market where everything was consumable. This is bad. I do credit Chinese scientists for the fast gene sequencing that led to a test being developed but even if exotic meat consumption is a cultural thing it still needs to the phased out.
Eating exotic mammals would be less bad if the mammals and their meat were actually subject to the same health regulations as less-exotic mammals. That is: the problem ain't the animals themselves, but rather that they're being sold in a black or grey market instead of through more legitimate channels.
This is a pretty common theme with black markets in general, on that note. See also: black market drugs being "cut" with harmful substances, black market sex labor being a vector for human trafficking and STDs, black market medical procedures being more susceptible to adverse outcomes, etc.
There are other good reasons to not eat exotic mammals, of course (i.e. if doing so puts species at risk of extinction), but the sanitation issue seems solvable.
I do not understand the reason for butchering wild life animals (e.g. bats). Is it belief system (e.g. traditional Chinese medicine) or they are just hungry?
Anthony Bourdain (RIP) loved weird exotic food — he talked about it at length in his books. The weirder the better. (Not for me; I went vegetarian about 5 years ago.)
These wildlife markets are a particular problem. But virologists (see: Pandemic on Netflix) highlight not just the wildlife trade be our enormous animal agriculture production as an explosive situation.
Both. Folk medicine is extremely common in China and the idea is that certain body parts from certain animals cure ailments/improve performance. Total backwards voodoo bullshit - like suppliments and crystals and homeopathy in the west, except animals are literally tortured over it.
There's a reason you can find so many videos online of Chinese people torturing animals. There is a belief in China (and to a lesser extent in other nations like Korea and I believe Vietnam) that making animals suffer pre slaughter makes the meat tastier. And honestly it isn't a stretch that adrenal hormones released just before death can influence the flavor or texture of meat, but I don't know if that justifies cruelty...
We've banned this account for flamewar posting. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606977, and if you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Being right and following the site guidelines are different things. The latter is what protects the community from destroying itself—assuming that's possible.
Fortunately, the two support each other, because if you're right, expressing your view in a thoughtful way makes the truth more apparent to others, while fulminating and attacking enemies merely alienates everyone who doesn't already agree with you. You end up discrediting the very truth you're advocating for. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I'm on mobile so I don't have time to collate a bunch of sources for something you could search for online, so here's a link to a summary.
NOTE: before you dismiss the source, notice that it is merely a commentary on a collection of individual sources that you can verify yourself. Now I do not agree with the conclusion in the link below, that this is a deliberate bioweapon, but there is ample circumstantial evidence here to at least presume that the virus could have leaked from the only level 4 biolab in China, which happens to be less than 10 miles from Wuhan. It's likely they were conducting legitimate research, all I'm pointing out is that the evidence for this actually coming from China is pretty good.
They have collected legitimate reports from e.g. the news.
It's no less legitimate than a bunch of links on a Wikipedia page. Don't be lazy and dismiss this because you don't like the political leaning of zerohedge.
>Russian disinformation site
But we're just going to believe everything out of China without a second thought right now?
Everything in that link, all the suspicious relationships, all the published research (arrested smugglers have published on coronavirus very recently) is verifiable. Don't be lazy.
Unbelievable that people are still not only buying the numbers but downvoting too.
Decades of easy living in the US has made the average native dangerously naive.
China is most likely going through a second wave of the infection either now or soon, as people return to work out of necessity to prevent supply shortages and food insecurity. Notice how they've totally locked everything down online - the internet was awash with leaked videos and tweets from people inside of china - but the government has clamped down on these dissenters hard enough to discourage the rest, apparently.
The CCP lies to save face. Its existence is predicated upon the fear and/or respect of the people it controls. It is not a free society.
The fact that covid is screwing the world right now does not mean that we should all be getting UBI under non emergency conditions. Putting Romney's plan in with Yang's is a conflation here because one is only for a single unprecedented global emergency, not everyday life.
That said, UBI is quite literal wealth redistribution. You take taxes from the haves and give the cash directly to the hands of the have nots. There's a point where it becomes unethical and/or counterproductive...but where that point is perhaps remains to be seen.
Bear in mind, we already engage in significant wealth redistribution. There's an argument that it's more efficient to do by writing checks, rather than through complex federal bureaucracies. It's the reason that Milton Friedman favored a negative income tax, and that GiveDirectly.org is considered by the Effective Altruism community to be one of the best charities.
What hasn't been established and what I think is a fair question, is whether this could ever practically roll out while simultaneously shutting down the existing welfare/disability/etc systems. As others have mentioned if it doesn't work people (see: vested political interests) will want a way to roll it back.
So in almost any practical case they will have to be running at the same time and will never truly be a net-neutral fiscal operation (assuming this is the outcome in practice) for at least the first 1-3+yrs.
Adopting UBI means increasing taxes, period. Even under ideal situations where the fiscal and productivity gains of replacing the current overly selective and bureaucratic processes, which significantly favours full-employment or zero-employment/disabilities in a black and white way with nothing in between - as opposed to the broader spectrum that markets can support when monthly deposits are not limited (including self-employed, disability, welfare, [un]employment income, etc) via far more efficient distributions systems replacing top-heavy systems, start to really take effect.
The whole "we'll just tax the 1%" hand-wavy stuff is not a good enough answer here. The amount of times that excuse has been used during political campaigns without congress doing anything significantly different is enough to be skeptical. As it then is no longer just UBI but UBI + significant tax code changes.
I personally don't think some trial runs in small parts of Canada or towns in individual states will be enough to prove much of anything. Especially given the vast amount of disparate systems these UBI systems would currently encompass across both federal/state governments in a big spectrum of economic/political environments across a large geographic area - which can't realistically be tested without it being a truly national affair. Of course federalism was designed exactly for this type of problem (individual states experimenting with policies so the cycle of progress is not forever limited to a long series of impractical all or nothing proposals across of bunch of states who disagree with each other) but the US has long ago sacrificed states government power for top heavy federal/executive run systems and this is the reality in which UBI must operate within.
> whether this could ever practically roll out while simultaneously shutting down the existing welfare/disability/etc systems
Yang's plan was for UBI to be opt-in, in exchange for waiving access to many existing programs (food stamps, etc). If he had gotten traction beyond 5%, we could've expected major pushback from the left on this; similar to M4A, in many ways it's more helpful to the lower middle class than the working class. But I suspect many would still vastly prefer check in hand, both due to the complex bureaucracy (and anxiety) of the existing system, and the elimination of poverty traps.
I think this is a reasonable way to shrink spending on existing "entitlements" without cutting them altogether; and would not only offset the cost, but grease the wheels of political viability (in a case of strange bedfellows, it aligns with the Paul Ryan / Steve Bannon "deconstruct the administrative state" playbook).
> The whole "we'll just tax the 1%" hand-wavy stuff is not a good enough answer here.
True: we'd have to raise more in tax revenue, full stop. I'd like to see a lot more enforcement and closing of loopholes within our existing tax code (Apple parking its cash in Ireland, etc). Easier said than done, I know. That aside, I think a micro-tax on high-frequency stock trades, and/or Yang's VAT, are both reasonable approaches.
My favorite strategy for raising public revenue, and wealth redistribution in particular, is the Pigovian Tax [0], which has an ancillary (primary?) benefit of setting a price on a negative externality. This is the proposed solution from "The Largest Public Statement of Economists in History" [1] on climate change; a sufficient carbon dividend could likely pay for a massive portion of UBI, though it would have to be ramped up gradually. I think there's a strong case for applying the concept in other domains as well (single-use plastics, for instance).
Finally, it's worth considering that all the hand-wavy trickle-down logic of "supply-side economics" might actually work when pointed in the other direction [2], like a stimulus package that never stops. In addition to reducing silent inefficiencies of economic struggle (addiction, short-term thinking, anxiety-induced low executive function), most of those receiving the dividend would spend it, increasing economic activity and therefore tax revenue. (There are potential problems with this model, the biggest being the risk of the lion's share going to landlords; but that opens up a whole other rabbit hole of Land Value Tax, Henry George, etc.; we arguably have a rent-seeking problem in that domain already, inducing a hidden tax on the working class with or without UBI.)
> That said, UBI is quite literal wealth redistribution. You take taxes from the haves and give the cash directly to the hands of the have nots.
Society is wealth distribution. Wealth doesn't exist outside of society. The US's existence is wealth distribution. Stealing land from natives to give to settlers. Stealing african's labor and distributing the wealth among slave owners. The rights to oil, resources, etc are wealth distribution.
Also, no wealth of any significance is ever earned by an individual. I hate how people say, Bezos, Gates, etc earned their wealth. Bezos didn't earn $100 billion. There is no way one person can physically earn that much. Bezos can't physically sell 100 billion items from the dollar menu. Wealth is generated by laws and cooperation and a fair/unfair distribution of value generated. Simple as that.
Also, don't give me the "great man" bullshit. Had bezos never been born, we'd still have an amazon of some kind. Jobs death didn't end Apple. There's always a "great man" to fill any void.
> There's a point where it becomes unethical and/or counterproductive...but where that point is perhaps remains to be seen.
Agreed. It's probably impossible to reach a happy medium since people always want more and whichever side gets a slight advantage will use it to further advantage themselves until society skews to one side and collapses.
Also, the other side of the coin is at what point does wealth accumulation become unethical and/or counterproductive.
are you seriously arguing that heavily taxing insanely wealthy people is unethical? i mean, we're literally living in a moment in which public school closures means many kids don't have reliable access to food anymore. there are plenty of other examples in which people are seriously struggling. and somehow taxing the wealthy is unethical. the fact that you bifurcate people into the "haves" and "have nots" speaks volumes.
and of course UBI is literally wealth distribution. what would you consider public schools, roads, infrastructure, and other things paid with taxes?
Not GP, but I think there’s a reasonable argument that taxing income for the purpose of funding essential government services is on stronger ethical footing than taxing wealth for the specific purpose of wealth redistribution.
The latter is IMO not ethical if it excessively punishes productive activity. In this case “impractical is unethical”, even as I’d prefer a UBI world in many ways.
Yep, it's redistribution. To tell what's really going on (like how progressive it is) you need to combine it with the revenue side and what the net gain or loss for each person is.
Everyone getting the same amount is symbolic equality. Symbolism can be important, though!
UBI looks far more expensive than it actually is because for many people, they'd be getting some of their own money back, similar to a tax refund. It's still expensive, though.
Technically Yang's UBI plan is that everyone receives it, regardless of wealth. Also there are plenty of entitlement programs already and replacing them with UBI would probably yield less total cost from simpler implementation and less bureaucracy, while making it more available.
"Also there are plenty of entitlement programs already and replacing them with UBI would probably yield less total cost from simpler implementation and less bureaucracy, while making it more available."
This is a fundamental flaw in the argument.
1) That a 'single program' will be cheaper. Maybe, but maybe not. My government spent more than $1 Billion implementing a simple 'gun registry' for police to store gun records.
(They spent $100M on a 'judicial assessment' of Aboriginal community's historical crimes - not a single study or dollar was spent on scientific analysis, research. Just lawyers.)
2) That any way shape or form those 'other programs' will disappear or a single government worker will lose their jobs.
The most powerful bodies in the world are Public Sector Unions. Tell me, what is the turnover rate for such jobs? How often are people laid off? Fired? What salary do they earn compared to private sector peers? How often are government agencies that have lost their material relevance shut down?
So aside from all of the regular arguments about UBI, social impact, cost, redistribution ... all of the arguments about 'efficiency' are completely moot. Government projects are generally extremely inefficient - they tend to work best through regulation, and/or competitive bidding for work that can be independently assessed, or when there's a social element. For example, road work and construction: we can roughly estimate cost, there are many bidders, and it's outsourced, not done directly by gov staff. This is efficient. Public schools are roughly efficient. Garbage collection. etc.
Your first example shows that government is terribly inefficient so a single program that just writes checks should be better than many programs with complex requirements and giant overhead.
As for the second, just because some labor unions are notoriously rent seeking doesn't mean we don't have mass changes in govt organizations. Programs are shutdown all the time. I doubt those labor unions would have a good argument against this anyway. What are they going to say? We're keeping our jobs so we can keep you from getting paid?
Some would argue quantitative easing is wealth redistribution (or directly leads too it). And many more believe we’ve reached the point where it’s useless, if not counterproductive.
Heck, almost everything anybody does related to the economic sphere is wealth (re)distribution.
Property rights are wealth redistribution away from the commons and towards a relatively small number of individuals. Does that make them bad? Well, I'd say maybe, it depends on the details...
We need to work against the effectiveness of this rhetoric trick where only some things are labelled "redistribution" to show them in a negative light.
How about calling it legacy building. We'll need to find some way to credit them to make it feel legit. Maybe let people pay a premium to bid on certain projects.
"This year's interstate highway funding brought to you by the Koch Brothers."
> You realize the top 1% already pay for a disproportionate amount of the taxes?
In absolute terms maybe (though there are some glaring exceptions -- Amazon famous literally pays $0 in taxes), but not relative to how much they make.
> To tax people's wealth on top of the standard tax is plain evil,
I don't see any reason why taxing net worth is at all less sensible than income. If anything I think it makes more sense; why should someone who's had a lucky break but is still not rich have to pay taxes like they are?
> will end up driving all the wealthiest people out of the country...
I don't take seriously the idea that any of them are going to give up living in the US over a couple percent of their income (which is what the wealth taxes folks have been talking about would take, at most).
> Amazon famous literally pays $0 in taxes), but not relative to how much they make.
because they took every penny and reinvested it and lost money for a long time because of such heavy investment.
just a few months ago everybody was complaining about companies not investing enough and returning money to shareholders - there was even legislation floated to force more investment.
companies cant win with people like you - invest and get assulted for tax reasons, don't invest and get yelled at for that.
you have this Utopian view of how you want everything to work, and don't even realize it isn't even possible most of the time.
I'm not really interested in judging Amazon; they're a for profit company, they're going to do what's best for their bottom line. And I'm sure they don't care what I think. This is more about the systemic issues with the tax code itself.
The devil is in the details; a lot of the things they're getting tax breaks for don't benefit the public. Why are they getting tax breaks for building warehouses and data centers for themselves? Stock based compensation for executives?
Also, regardless of what breaks are available for what activities, their baseline tax burden ought to be much higher. We should be drawing funding from people who can afford it and use it to lift the burden on people who can't.
> Why are they getting tax breaks for building warehouses and data centers for themselves?
Are you fucking kidding me? They get capital construction break like every other company gets. If you don't see that as the literal definition of investment you don't deserve to have an opinion on this.
I don't think we should be giving them tax breaks for investments that are only for themselves. They're going to do that anyway because it expands their business. If they were doing something that had a genuine public benefit, that they otherwise wouldn't do, that would be a different story.
that's the same thing. we set up tax structures to encourage long term investment precisely because we hope companies will try to invest to avoid taxes.
Bill Gates once talked about money no longer having a utility for him. The utility of money goes away at a certain point when you accumulate too much and there is no longer something you cannot buy. The utility would be most efficient when applied to a better use such applied as the needy, perhaps in a UBI, or some other strategy, which would free up their time to do something more productive for society.
Unfortunately people don't like to help each other in many capitalist countries, and laws are designed to not be easily changed, resulting in a great majority of the population either not heard or reluctant to voice their opinions.
It took Bill a long time to get there too. But it's the same for any billionaire. They can't possibly spend their money, neither can their children or grandchildren so the only thing you can do with it is give it away. Be that to charity, good works, monuments to yourself (art museums, university buildings) or politicians and think-tanks in an attempt to bend the world to your will.
The money is just one scoreboard among billionaires and not great one. Murdoch would be far more self-impressed with his power he weilds through media than someone with an additionall couple of hundred million.
Gates is more interested in being the great philanthropist. It seems his scoreboard is how much positive effect on the world he can have. It sounds ideal and I don't like to be cynical about it.
Koch Brother(s), Soros also can't spend their money on more houses, cars and private jets. More money is only useful to get more power. Do you like the way either or both weild it? Do you think they should have a bigger say than you purely by virtue of cash rather than making a convincing case?
That's actually the point of the wealth tax. The reason the pay a disproportionate amount is because the own a disproportionate amount. The current system is also a redistribution of wealth, just from the bottom to the top. That's what a wealth tax is supposed to change.
Regarding the argument about companies, I'm sure the French king also employed a lot of people, we still got right of the system of absolutism.
I'm guessing the vast majority of "wealth" is in assets/stocks. That isn't money just sitting around. The value is only realized when those are selled off. They also would owe capital gains tax. So now they gets taxed twice?
> The current system is also a redistribution of wealth, just from the bottom to the top.
I think that capitalism/free markets has been the biggest driver in bringing people out of poverty.
> That's what a wealth tax is supposed to change.
This is also hugely immoral. Property is a fundamental human right. There is no "right" in having as much money as someone else. In the US at least, there is supposed to be equal protection of your rights. Taking money from one person and giving to another is immoral. Besides, wealthy people are also people that donate enormous amounts of money. Let them figure out how they want to give it away.
> Regarding the argument about companies, I'm sure the French king also employed a lot of people, we still got right of the system of absolutism.
You will have to provide me some more evidence on how these are connected.
I don't understand this argument. I've seen it so many times among a certain crowd of people, but I still don't get it. Yes, we, mere mortal humans have to form our systems of government using a patchwork of heuristics as we try to approach a more perfect system.
Sure, an omnipotent being that knew all outcomes in advance could set a perfect single-tax rate for each person's individual circumstance that only affected their income. Is this somehow more valid than trying to approximate this same outcome by taxing wealth as a correction on top of what income-tax and other taxes were supposed to accomplish?
>I don't understand this argument. I've seen it so many times among a certain crowd of people, but I still don't get it.
Wealth tax makes no sense because if you earned that money, then you have already paid taxes on it. Taxing assets/stocks makes no sense because the value is constantly changing. One day you could have millions and the next you could be broke. Plus, if you had zero cash on hand, you would have to liquidate an asset just to pay the taxes on it?
> Sure, an omnipotent being that knew all outcomes in advance could set a perfect single-tax rate for each person's individual circumstance that only affected their income.
A flat tax would work fine too, and be the most "fair".
> taxing wealth as a correction
I don't think the main purpose of taxation is redistribution. Who says there needs to be a correction in the first place? I don't think people really care about equality, because no one cares about the inequality of the rich vs. the super rich. They care about the lowest end, and if they have at least enough to support themselves. Which if you're making under a certain amount and have kids you pay basically zero taxes. In fact, you may even get money from the government.
>Taking money from one person and giving to another is immoral
Basically every society in the world does this, how is it immoral? I think it is immoral not to do that, considering that there is no way that any society can guarantee absolute equality of opportunity for all citizens.
> Basically every society in the world does this, how is it immoral?
The difference is taxes should be paying for public goods, to which everyone is equally entitled and able to use. Taking money from one person to give directly to another person is stealing, how is that not immoral?
> considering that there is no way that any society can guarantee absolute equality of opportunity for all citizens.
It's impossible to guarantee that. Some people are born rich, some are born poor. What can be guaranteed is equal protection of your rights and your individual freedoms. There is no right to equality in the economic sense, because it requires infringing on the rights of others.
Taxation is not stealing. In the ECHR for example your right to property is completely superseded by anything the government decides is in the best interest of society:
>(1) Every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions. No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest and subject to the conditions provided for by law and by the general principles of international law.
>(2) The preceding provisions shall not, however, in any way impair the right of a state to enforce such laws as it deems necessary to control the use of property in accordance with the general interest or to secure the payment of taxes or other contributions or penalties.
> No one shall be deprived of his possessions except in the public interest
As I mentioned, taxes for public goods makes sense. If they are just going directly to someone else's pocket then it's not exactly for the "public" at that point.
The ECHR is missing the freedom of speech, so I wouldn't look to that as a leader in individual rights.
> The Pew Center’s analysis of IRS data showed that in 2014, people with an adjusted gross income, or AGI, above $250,000 paid 51.6% of all individual income taxes, even though they accounted for only 2.7% of all returns filed. These “wealthy” individuals paid an average tax rate (total taxes paid divided by cumulative AGI) of 25.7%.
> By contrast, while people with adjusted gross incomes below $50,000 filed 62% of all individual returns in 2014, they paid only 5.7% of total taxes collected at an average tax rate of 4.3% per person.
- If those with AGI above $250k paid 51.6% of all individual income taxes, what did they each pay per year in individual income tax?
- What did those with AGI above $2,500k pay? What percentage of annual revenue is that compared with someone on a decent professional wage, or on minimum wage?
Some billionaires may, but at least in the US this often isn't true. Off the top of my head, the Collison brothers or Sergey Brin don't need the US in any fundamental sense; they weren't born here, but came here because they thought the US was a great place to build a valuable business. If we decide that we don't like this as a matter of policy, maybe the existing crop of billionaires will be too enmeshed to leave, but the next set of foreign entrepreneurs with billion-dollar ideas won't show up in the first place.
If you renounce your US citizenship you still owe income tax for a decade. They can leave if they want, I don't really want billionaires running our country
Percentages and dollar amounts don't matter. A low income person paying taxes hinders their ability to buy food and housing and clothing. A billionaire paying taxes means they have 6 megayachts instead of 7. It's apples and oranges.
It is unethical to allow billionaires to thrive while people die from poverty.
There's some point between "take nothing" and "take everything including your family home, dog, and toothbrush" where most people would believe a wealth tax to be unethical. I think this is what GP was trying to say, without picking a spot on the continuum.
There are several founders of YC companies that are self-made billionaires and they post on this very forum.
Do you really think they made it on the "backs of society" through "corruption and bribery" rather than building a company that provides value to those willing to pay for it?
If they made their money in a vacuum with no interaction to society then they would owe nothing to society. That isn't the case. They absolutely made their money on the back of society, including the decades of wealthy lobbying/bribery that came before them that has allows them to keep their immoral gains
The internet was created by governments, much of its technical infrastructure through open source projects, and I’m pretty sure most of those billionaire companies had at least some employees (many of whom I assume were also educated in public schools and state universities).
So, yes, quite obviously, they made it on the “backs of society.”
Taxes are not equally paid either. I'm not sure what your point is. Do you want to limit wealth? Do you want to ban entrepreneurship? Do you want communism?
What I want is for the value workers create to be returned to them, not hoovered up by the wealthy in some distortive, unjustifiable scheme that prizes Capital ownership over everything else, including the lives and well-being of the majority of citizens.
No thanks. No need for an ideology that has killed hundreds of millions while keeping the ones the survived in poverty.
Any wealth inequality that exists in capitalism is only magnified in communism where an even smaller group of people have both political and monetary power.
In order for capitalism to work, money has to change hands. Typically, money changes hands for an item or service of perceived value. Again, typically, there is a profit calculated into that transaction. That small fraction which constitutes the profit is often wealth transferring from one person to another. Over time, that wealth coalesces into fewer and fewer hands. There are many ways to combat this pooling of wealth into the hands of the few, but none of the traditional ways appear to work in the face of automation. Capitalism will fail if people do not have money to spend.
We exchange value based on price discovery; but prices are determined by leverage, which is heavily tilted by pre-existing capital. One doesn't notice this at a micro-transaction level (how many shoes for how many chickens), but once one zooms out to the balance of power between labor and capital, one clearly holds all the cards ~90% of the time.
Do we know yet what the probability of packaging borne transmission is? Has anyone seen anything? I saw one study describing virus lifetime on various surfaces but I don't think they tested cardboard.
Also I don't know what they're expecting. They either have mountains of stock or they'll be laying these people back off soon when factories close. I think supplies out of China are still disrupted.
My neighborhood has eight houses per acre. We've had no problems with stolen packages even when left out overnight. This is the exurban fringe of metro Atlanta.
Surprisingly yes. There are also townhouse and apartment complexes. Most homes are on bigger lots but I was surprised by the diversity of housing choices out here.
Paranoid thought - what if it's on plastic or exposed steel on something inside the package (like the wrapping on a box or an ladle that doesn't come fully enclosed in a box), you need to wait three days or so.
I have an old Windex spray bottle that ive filled with rubbing alcohol and I've been blasting everything with extreme paranoia.
Honestly statistically speaking in most areas out chances of coming into contact with the virus are still quite low. There's 300MM+ people here and even if 1MM are infected, those are good odds.
You are presuming that you are meeting people at random - however you are most likely to meet people with a high number of social interactions, and they are far more likely to catch the virus.
Depending on the social graph, your chances vary, but the chance will clearly be far worse than a crude estimate.
Sunlight (UV exposure) helps kill bugs. If you're not worried about porch pirates, I'd leave the packages in the sun. Perhaps turn them over now and then.
Almost the same here, leaving them in garage for two days. It feels weird how the new normal, protocols to avoid infection, are starting to seem like the same old routine now. Wonder how it will feel after a few months, or more.
I'm curious to see if packages and deliveries were seen as transmission vectors in any other infectious epidemics. If packages were a reliable transmission vector, you'd expect to see much higher infection rate of truckers, postal workers, shop clerks, etc. I haven't found evidence of this.
I know that China relied heavily on deliveries for food and essential goods in Wuhan, but also seemed to be having people doing deliveries kitted in protective gear.
Not sure how this affected transmission, but doubt the same protections will be in place for delivery workers in the US because of shortages masks, gloves, etc.
Between the economy, the oil price war, the politicization of politics, and most pressingly the virus, 2019ncov is proving to be the potential trigger for wide scale geopolitical change and possibly insecurity. States are going to go into quarantine one by one with little to no coordination. Governments and law agencies will be commandeering emergency powers. We are sitting on a major pressure point and it's impossible to predict the outcome, but there is a high likelihood of political instability and/or violence, even within America.
If the economy doesn't recover soon, people are going to grow increasingly hungry and desperate without radical federal measures. It is prudent to be prepared to defend yourself now because this is shaping up to be the kind of scenario where you really cannot rely on first responders to protect you.
Edit: I meant "polarization of politics" but autocorrect may be hinting at something profound...
That wouldn't be entirely inappropriate to leave it up to states if the states weren't also clearly as incapable as the government has shown to be.
Edit: sorry for the confusion, I'm saying letting states decide on appropriate measures somewhat independently is not necessarily a bad idea when competent people are in charge. Each state will have unique circumstances which will require customized interventions. I hear Ohio has been handling this well.
I just don't see how these closures aren't going to ripple through the global economy. The market is down 25% YTD after two desperate stimulus measures - $1.5T injection and interest rates cut to zero.
What are you going to prop up when world travel and trade is shut down? And domestic regions are locked down too?
The kicker is that we had been seeing negative long term indicators for a while before this - inverted yield curve, and long overdue for the approximately 7 year recession cycle, among other indicators.
I would love to be convinced otherwise but, regardless of the outcome of the 2019ncov situation, this is shaping up to be a trigger for a global recession, possibly a depression. Modern society cannot sustain itself indoors without radical measures. The vast majority of people probably work at jobs that cannot be performed remotely.
It almost certainly will. But there's a reason virtually every macro-economist is forecasting a rapid V-shaped recovery after the quarantine eventually ends.
At the end of the day, 90% of the population will still be working through the quarantine. And most of the rest will still receive unemployment benefits. Think about all those people collecting a paycheck, and just sitting at home. Now what happens when the quarantine ends?
They take all that money they've built up, and unleash it all at once. All those big-ticket purchases, vacations, and events, that got deferred happen in a short burst. All those people cooped up at home, will flood into restaurants, stores, and concerts. Think Chicago on the first warm day of spring. It's likely to be the greatest one-time surge in consumer spending in all of recorded history.
That's virtually guaranteed to jump-start the economy near instantaneously. And unlike 2008, the chance of systemic financial contagion is extremely low in today's environment. Banks are extremely well capitalized, and the vast majority of risky investment has been moved to non-bank entities, like corporate debt markets, private equity funds, and CLOs.
Sure, but business travel only accounts for 1.5% of GDP. And it's pretty unlikely that it permanently falls by more than 50%. Then you have the fact that if company's spend less on business travel, they'll have more to spend on other things. In particular expect to see products like Zoom and Slack get much more spending as virtual meetings become the norm.
Finally even if business travel falls, expect consumers to make up a lot of the reduction in demand. The capacity exists and isn't going anywhere. Those airline seats and hotel rooms aren't going to sit empty. The price may fall, but tourists will take more trips when given discounts on the prices they're used to.
In general you can extend this reasoning to most of the pessimistic scenarios. First, real productive capacity will still be the same after the quarantine as it was before. Second, money spent in some sector isn't just going to get thrown into a hole if people stop consuming those products. One industry's loss is almost always another industry's gain. Finally, when demand contracts that means falling prices. When prices fall that enables new consumers and business models in the market.
In Europe many industries, including air travel are at or over capacity. Airlines operate at razer thin margins. We might see some consolidation in the market which could decrease the overhead costs, but not by much. There is simply no room to decrease prices that much. And there is not much evidence that the demand is very price-elastic either. Air travel has more competition by other forms of travel with less safety restrictions, less climate impact stigma, etc.
All indications are that this virus will take more than two months to deal with - you should carefully monitor China for the next few weeks because their self reported recovery may not be genuine.
How long can businesses hold out? What's stopping authoritarianism from taking hold, left and/or right, if this drags on for 3-6 months? We don't even know if you build lasting immunity to this virus yet. It could become endemic.
> What's stopping authoritarianism from taking hold, left and/or right, if this drags on for 3-6 months?
On a different planet this topic would be discussed, at length, along with measures to contain the virus. Once we're in lockdown mode worldwide with only the shiny screen to tell us what is going on, it is game over, and rather too late to discuss and set the ground rules for "emergency" regimes.
> I just don't see how these closures aren't going to ripple through the global economy.
I can see it not rippling if (a) a vaccine comes out in time, or (b) people just give up and work anyway, accepting coronavirus as a risk of life. Unlike sacrificing everything for the sake of not getting coronavirus, that can actually go on indefinitely.
"Unlike sacrificing everything for the sake of not getting coronavirus, that can actually go on indefinitely."
Not even remotely true.
If people go back to normal (against the advice from every agency with experience handling communicable diseases) the disease will spread at an exponential rate. Healthcare systems across the globe will be overwhelmed (like Italy and China but vastly worse) and people start suffering and dying from curable illnesses due to lack of capacity.
Then, once people start dying by thousands, everyone will quarantine themselves anyway.
The vaccine will take like 1 year to test and be sure that it is effective and that it is safe and cause no nasty side effects. So for 2020, let's ignore (a).
I don't know why this is being downvoted. A year is actually a fairly aggressive schedule. Of course there may be certain elected officials who will push to certify anything at all before November but nothing will be proven safe in that little time.
It might not take that long. If the vaccine candidate is viable, Stage 1 trials could be completed in a few months since there's already tons of patients with COVID-19 going to hospitals where they can be monitored for a maximum safe dose trial. The FDA might be able to waive most of Phase 1 similar to some oncology drugs and once it hits Phase 2, they just needs enough data about efficacy and safety to declare it a breakthrough therapy. The reality is that many clinical trials take time because of how long it takes to set up the infrastructure, get patients, and coordinate with an understaffed and underfunded FDA. If the entire agency is ordered to focus on COVID-19, I think it could happen a lot faster.
That's only if the vaccine works though. If do that process and it turns out it doesn't, it could make the situation a whole lot worse.
There is a high probability that at least many candidate vaccines could have induce a deadly autoimmune reaction upon exposure to the virus, because of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE), which is shared by other coronaviruses like the previous SARS. At least one paper I read trialing multiple vaccine candidates on animals reported failures in all cases due to autoimmune damage to lung tissue.
Can a vaccine be released in such a short timeframe? I don't think anyone is suggesting a vaccine can be released in less than several months. But it is suggested that the pandemic itself could subside within that timeframe.
If you develop symptoms you may need serious medical attention (intubation) in order to survive regardless of age.
Wether or not you develop symptoms you can develop serious organ damage that results in life long chronic health problems (due to damage to lungs, kidneys and testes.)
It sounds to me like this virus is in fact much more serious than most people thought even with the hype.
Whether or not it's too serious for b depends on the alternatives. When the alternative is you don't make any money or have anything to eat, coronavirus might seem like the inevitable alternative, especially for younger/healthier folks.
I didn't want to write it out again but you took the words out of my mouth.
All of the worst [pending] peer reviewer papers are gradually being confirmed, it seems. The news has been getting consistently worse for literally two months now and we now have at least a dozen countries on lockdown, and growing.
vaccine take a year more more to develop people should stop saying this. Whats gonna happen is the same thing that will happen with chickenpox. Everyone will get it and you'll be ok unless you have a underlining condition
IMHO it’s futile to try to keep the economy “on the up” at a time like this, we’re basically throwing good money into a fire. Just take the hit and try to keep people alive; as soon as the emergency phase is over, the market will rebound on its own. Humanity existed before capitalism, surely it can live a few months without it.
I think the point is that the measures are overblown in relation to the hazard COVID-19 actually constitutes. It is a pandemic, and relatively virulent.
However, symptoms and mortality rate have been exaggerated by the media, causing more panic than necessary. If a wave of Influenza would get the same attention and monitoring, it would expose similarly shocking stats ("exponential" growth, and around half a million deaths yearly). Yet there are very few measures actually taken by governments there, because it's difficult and basically an uphill fight.
For what it's worth, note that alleged mortality rates for COVID-19 are in fact just very rough upper bounds, since there is no systematic testing happening yet on a large scale. The closest to that is probably South Korea, where deaths make up less than 1% of confirmed cases. In contrast, Influenza mortality rates are always based on estimations, not just on documented infections.
> symptoms and mortality rate have been exaggerated by the media
Dude, believe what you will, but in the most affected areas, they can't even bury bodies fast enough, they are literally filling up churches with coffins. This does not happen with influenza, because we have vaccines and mitigation techniques that we do not have with Covid19. We don't even know for sure if or when reinfection can occur.
In a regular year, influenza in Italy kills 400-500 people, and simple pneumonia kills another 6,000 to 8,000. We've had 2,000 deaths from covid19 in 2 weeks, and concentrated in 20% of the country. Do we really want to "let it run its course" for a full year over the whole of Europe? At this rate, in two months we'll have broken all records.
>In a regular year, influenza in Italy kills 400-500 people
Data is literally one query away.
>We estimated excess deaths of 7,027, 20,259, 15,801 and 24,981 attributable to influenza epidemics in the 2013/14, 2014/15, 2015/16 and 2016/17, respectively, using the Goldstein index.
